You might recall that early this year a group of Marvel’s Mightiest, the X-Men, had a run-in with that evil-doer most foul, Crappy Photoshop. Now the villain strikes again as the heroes of The Avengers make their Entertainment Weekly cover debut. Hit the jump, if you dare, to see the horror of Black Widow’s giant head and the visage of Mark Ruffalo as he is afflicted with the scourge of the middle 2000s, duckface.

Update: Three more images have arrived via EW, and have been added to the gallery below. They’re on-set shots, so they’re much better than the lousy cover.

We’ll likely see more images from the EW article as the issue hits the stands, but for now here’s the cover, and, via ComingSoon, an alternate lineup of the same hero shots. Scarlett Johansson‘s head looks suspiciously large in proportion to her body, and I can’t imagine that Blue Steel shot of Ruffalo was the only usable one. Too bad. Robert Downey Jr.‘s drivers license photo looks OK by comparison, and as Thor, Chris Hemsworth seems to be thinking “we’d never have put up with this in Asgard.”

(And, no, this isn’t the worst image ever put together — any hyperbole to the contrary is merely the act of poking fun at the fact that, for a cover debut on a major magazine, this looks like a last-minute effort.)

The whole enterprise is falling apart. Egos, tempers, uneasy alliances and bad attitudes are threatening the group, and failure would be catastrophic.

The article accompanying the cover debut promises a lot of friction between the characters, and that’s good — conflict within the team has always been a part of the Avengers.

It also notes that Downey was constantly pushing Joss Whedon to punch up and rewrite dialogue on the fly, and quotes Whedon saying ““There is a weird element of: they handed me one of the biggest movies of all time, and I’m making it up as I go.” Let’s not make too much of that quote, though, at least not until after seeing the film. Downey pushed the same approach on the Iron Man films, and at least one of those turned out fine.